Looking Beyond the American Gridlock |
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The Congressional failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation has been compounded by the hostility of the current House of Representatives to climate-related measures. Recent actions include the elimination of the Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming, an assault on the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions, and the attempted elimination of greenhouse gas reporting by the federal government. Meanwhile, climate change itself moves inexorably forward, as David Wheeler documents in his newly released working paper, “Quantifying Vulnerability to Climate Change: Implications for Adaptation Assistance.” The U.S. federal default is not surprising to David, who explores its economic roots in another recent paper, “Confronting the American Divide on Carbon Emissions Regulation.” He traces the problem to an interstate disparity in carbon abatement costs that dwarfs any disparity encountered by the European Union when it established its Emissions Trading System. In two related blogs (here and here), David identifies the blocking minority of U.S. states that have undermined federal action and proposes two strategies for circumventing this minority: One through the unilateral adoption of a carbon-added tax by U.S. “green states” and the other through a new model for collaboration in which U.S. “green states” directly participate in international climate agreements. |
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Financing Carbon Emissions Mitigation and Climate Change Adaptation |
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American fiddling will not prevent the world from burning (or drowning), and CGD continues to publish path-breaking research on measures to assist developing countries as they adapt to the climate change that has now become inevitable. In the run-up to the April UN climate talks in Bangkok, the Korean government urged the donor community to use scarce funds wisely by creating a climate vulnerability index to guide allocation of adaptation assistance. Anticipating this challenge, in January, David published a CGD working paper, “Quantifying Vulnerability to Climate Change: Implications for Adaptation Assistance,” in which he quantified the vulnerability of 233 countries to three major effects of climate change: weather-related disasters, sea-level rise, and reduced agricultural productivity. David provides an introduction to the indicators and their use in a recent blog. CGD researchers have continued to contribute to the global effort to mobilize funds for combating climate change and its impacts. In a recently released working paper, “Find me the Money,” Nancy Birdsall and Ben Leo provide innovative proposals for mobilizing the requisite public funds. In one proposal, governments utilize a modest portion of their Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocations to capitalize a third-party financing entity that would offer bonds on international capital markets backed by its SDR reserves—an extension of an idea discussed earlier here as a way to jumpstart financing for climate change. To promote greater participation by the private sector, Darius Nassiry and David Wheeler have just published a detailed proposal in “A Green Venture Fund to Finance Clean Technology for Developing Countries.” They propose a dual fund-of-funds approach to leveraging private finance as a way to promote clean technology innovation and deployment. As UN talks to form the new Green Climate Fund move forward, negotiators and policymakers will need to find new ways to mobilize substantial resources. Approaches that efficiently use public resources to leverage private capital should be at the forefront of these discussions. |
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Introducing Michele de Nevers |
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CGD is very pleased to welcome Michele de Nevers as a visiting senior associate. Michele joins CGD from the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford. She previously served in a number of high-level positions at the World Bank, most recently as Senior Manager of the Environment Department, where she was a leading force in promoting the Bank’s new climate and clean energy agendas. Michele will be focusing her formidable talents on moving CGD’s climate program from ideas to action—including through this newsletter—and we’re bound to see great results. |
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